Orson Welles Quotes

Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what’s for lunch.

In the moment when I truly understand my enemy, understand him well enough to defeat him, then in that very moment I also love him. I think it’s impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves. And then, in that very moment when I love them.... I destroy them.

My doctor told me to stop having intimate dinners for four. Unless there are three other people.

Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn

If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story.

We're born alone, we live alone, we die alone. Only through our love and friendship can we create the illusion for the moment that we're not alone.

I don't pray really, because I don't want to bore God.

The absence of limitations is the enemy of art.

If there hadn't been women we'd still be squatting in a cave eating raw meat, because we made civilization in order to impress our girlfriends.

I don't say we all ought to misbehave, but we ought to look as if we could.

If you want a happy ending, it just depends on where you close the book!

There are three intolerable things in life - cold coffee, lukewarm champagne, and overexcited women...

In my opinion, there are two things that can absolutely not be carried to the screen: the realistic presentation of the sexual act and praying to God.

I passionately hate the idea of being with it, I think an artist has always to be out of step with his time.

You're beautful. Yes you are, you're very very beautiful. Extremely beautiful.

I dont believe in learning from other peoples pictures. I think you should learn from your own interior vision of things and discover, as I say, Innocently, as though there had never been anybody.

A writer needs a pen, an artist needs a brush, but a filmmaker needs an army.

We’re born alone, we live alone, we die alone. Only through our love and friendship can we create the illusion for a moment that we’re not alone.

All is going well, very well, I couldn’t ask for anything better— So why do I hate my life?

A good artist should be isolated. If he isn't isolated, something is wrong.

I'm not basically a happy person, but I have all kinds of joy.

Every actor in his heart believes everything bad that's printed about him.

I don't think any word can explain a man's life.

What's happening now is what happened before, and often what's going to happen again sometime or other

I know, you've been here a year, you think these people are normal. Well, they're not. WE'RE not. I look in the library, I call up books on my desk. Old ones, because they won't let us have anything new, but I've got a pretty good idea what children are, and we're not children. Children can lose sometimes, and nobody cares. Children aren't in armies, they aren't COMMANDERS, they don't rule over forty other kids, it's more than anybody can take and not get crazy.

I much prefer people who rock the boat to people who jump out.

A toast, Jedediah, to love on my terms. Those are the only terms anybody ever knows - his own.

نأتي للعالم وحدنا، ونموت وحدنا، ونعيش وحدنا. الحب والصداقة هما أقرب شيئين يمكننا إيجادهما لصنع الوهم أننا لسنا وحدنا تماماً.

So I want to ask you a hypothetical question. My favorite kind. Next to rhetorical ones. I can nap equally well through either kind.

You made them hate me." Said Ender "So? What will you do about it? Crawl in a corner? Start kissing their little backsides so they'll love you again? There's only one thing that will make them stop hating you. And that's being so good at what you do that they can't ignore you. I told them you were the best. Now you damn well better be." -Graff

I can think of nothing that an audience won't understand. The only problem is to interest them;once they are interested, they understand anything in the world.

The enemy of art is the absence of limitations.

If you want a happy ending, it depends on where you stop the story

Every man who is any kind of artist has a great deal of female in him. I act and give of myself as a man, but I register and receive with the soul of a woman. The only really good artists are feminine. I can't admit the existence of an artist whose dominant personality is masculine.

Our works in stone, in paint, in print, are spared, some of them, for a few decades or a millennium or two, but everything must finally fall in war, or wear away into the ultimate and universal ash - the triumphs, the frauds, the treasures and the fakes. A fact of life: we're going to die. "Be of good heart," cry the dead artists out of the living past. "Our songs will all be silenced, but what of it? Go on singing." Maybe a man's name doesn't matter all that much.

Ah, I am the judge of dreams, and you are the judge of love. Well, I find you guilty of dreaming good dreams, and sentence you to a lifetime of working and suffering for the sake of your dreams. I only hope that someday you won't declare me innocent of the crime of loving you.

And it came down to this: In the moment when I truly understand my enemy, understand him well enough to defeat him, then in that very moment I also love him. I think it's impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves. And then, in the very moment when I love them--" "You beat them." For a moment she was not afraid of his understanding. "No, you don't understand. I destroy them. I make it impossible for them to ever hurt me again. I grind them and grind them until they don't exist.

I want to give the audience a hint of a scene. No more than that. Give them too much and they won't contribute anything themselves. Give them just a suggestion and you get them working with you. That's what gives the theater meaning: when it becomes a social act.

When you are down and out, something always turns up - usually the noses of your friends.

Armies have spent a lot of time and effort training their soldiers not to think of the enemy as human beings. It’s so much easier to kill them if you think of them as dangerous animals. The trouble is, war isn’t about killing. It’s about getting the enemy to stop resisting your will. Like training a dog not to bite. Punishing him leaves you with a beaten dog. Killing him is a permanent solution, but you’ve got no dog. If you can understand why he’s biting and remove the conditions that make him bite, sometimes that can solve the problem as well. The dog isn’t dead. He isn’t even your enemy.

A film is never really good unless the camera is an eye in the head of a poet.

Atop a Ferris wheel, Orson Welles told Joseph Cotten how Italy's thirty years of war and terror and bloodshed had produced the Renaissance and Michelangelo, and how Switzerland's five hundred years of democracy and peace had produced, goddamn, only the cuckoo clock.

You're like, both like, Alexander the Great.' We can't both be Alexander.' Well sometimes I think you're two side of the same coin, and I'm the metal in between.

In the moment when I truly understand my enemy, understand him well enough to defeat him, then in that very moment I also love him...

The fact is I am quite happy in a movie, even a bad movie. Other people, so I have read, treasure memorable moments in their lives: the time one climbed the Parthenon at sunrise, the summer night one met a lonely girl in Central Park and achieved with her a sweet and natural relationship, as they say in books. I too once met a girl in Central Park, but it is not much to remember. What I remember is the time John Wayne killed three men with a carbine as he was falling to the dusty street in Stagecoach, and the time the kitten found Orson Welles in the doorway in The Third Man.

I knew her so well that I loved her, or maybe I loved her so well that I knew her. I didn't want to fight her anymore. I wanted to quit. I wanted to go home. So I blew up her planet.

Viele Menschen sind gut erzogen, um nicht mit vollem Mund zu sprechen, aber sie haben keine Bedenken, es mit leerem Kopf zu tun.

Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn.

There are no villains who doesn't have his reasons.

If one has to say, in an argument, "I am intelligent! I do know things!" then one might as well stop arguing.

Whoop-de-do," said Ram. "What?" "I'm celebrating." "Was that irony or loss of mental function?" asked the expendable. "Was that a rhetorical questions, a bit of humor, or a sign that you are losing confidence in me?" "I have no confidence in you, Ram," said the expendable. "Well, thanks." "You're welcome.

Everything about me is a contradiction, and so is everything about everybody else. We are made out of oppositions; we live between two poles. There’s a philistine and an aesthete in all of us, and a murderer and a saint. You don’t reconcile the poles. You just recognize them.

Many would never speak with a full mouth, but do it with an empty head

Well, I'm your man. I'm the bloody bastard you wanted when you had me spawned. I'm your tool, and what difference does it make if I hate the part of me that you most need? What difference does it make that when the little serpents killed me in the game, I agreed with them, and was glad.

Roosevelt used to say, "You and I are the two best actors in America.

Anyone who believes he has caught him in a fantastic lie is apt to find out that the fantastic story is the truth. And some unimportant statement, like just having bought an evening paper a half-hour ago, is the lie." --On Orson Welles

On my tombstone, I want written, ‘He never did 'Love Boat!

[Orson Welles] was a man who made the greatest film ever made and was never forgiven for it.

Exactly, I repeated myself. I believe we do it all the time. We always take up certain elements again. How can it be avoided? An actor’s voice always has the same timbre and, consequently, he repeats himself. It is the same for a singer, a painter…There are always certain things that come back, for they are part of one’s personality, of one’s style. If these things didn’t come into play, a personality would be so complex that it would become impossible to identify it. It is not my intention to repeat myself, but in my work there should certainly be references to what I have done in the past. Say what you will, but The Trial is the best film I ever made…I have never been so happy as when I made this film. (talking about directing, The Trial (1962) - from Orson Welles: Interviews (book))

But in the military you don't get trusted positions just because of your ability. You also have to attract the notice of superior officers. You have to be liked. You have to fit in with the system. You have to look like what the officers above you think that officers should look like. You have to think in ways that they are comfortable with. The result was that you ended up with a command structure that was top-heavy with guys who looked good in uniform and talked right and did well enough not to embarrass themselves, while the really good ones quietly did all the serious work and bailed out their superiors and got blamed for errors they had advised against until they eventually got out. That was the military.

Other people, so I have read, treasure memorable moments in their lives: the time one climbed the Parthenon at sunrise, the summer night one met a lonely girl in Central Park and achieved with her a sweet and natural relationship, as they say in books. I too once met a girl in Central Park, but it is not much to remember. What I remember is the time John Wayne killed three men with a carbine as he was falling to the dusty street in Stagecoach, and the time the kitten found Orson Welles in the doorway in The Third Man.

I can't work in a sewer. I come from California.

I got that good a contract because I really didn't want to make a film.

Almost any story is almost certainly some kind of lie.

IF YOU WANT A HAPPY ENDING, THAT DEPENDS, OF COURSE, ON WHERE YOU STOP YOUR STORY.” —ORSON WELLES

It had to be a trick or you couldn’t have done it. It’s the bind we were in. We had to have a commander with so much empathy that he would think like the buggers, understand them and anticipate them. So much compassion that he could win the love of his underlings and work with them like a perfect machine, as perfect as the buggers. But somebody with that much compassion could never be the killer we needed. Could never go into battle willing to win at all costs. If you knew, you couldn’t do it. If you were the kind of person who would do it even if you knew, you could never have understood the buggers well enough.

There are rules to everything, even if nobody made them up, even if nobody calls it a game. And if you want things to work out well, it's best to know the rules and only break them if you're playing a different game and following those rules.

There are rules to everything, even if nobody made them up, even if nobody calls it a game. And if you want things to work out well, it's best to know the rules and only break them if you're playing a different game and following those rules.

...she found it made things easier if she dramatised them. Or melodramatised them. It was easier, for example, to face the fact of Uncle Philip if she saw him as a character in a film, possibly played by Orson Welles.

Well, I’m your man. I’m the bloody bastard you wanted when you had me spawned. I’m your tool, and what difference does it make if I hate the part of me that you most need? What difference does it make that when the little serpents killed me in the game, I agreed with them, and was glad.

This was done to you by men and women whose only desire was to enslave you; they have succeeded so well that you are proud of your slavery.

A man does not belong to the place he was born in, but to the place he chooses to die.

No matter how well you know what a person has done and what he thought he was doing when he did it and what he now thinks of what he did, it is impossible to be certain of what he will do next.

In the moment when I truly understand my enemy, understand him well enough to defeat him, then in that very moment I also love him. I think it’s impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves.

Women are another race. They are always changing, like the moon. You can only win by being the cool center of their being. You have to represent something solid and loving. The anchor. Even if you are not. You can't tell them the truth. You have to lie and play games. I’ve never in my entire life been with someone with whom I didn’t have to play a game. I've never been with anyone with whom I could be exactly who I am.

So that's it?" asked the expendable. "Final decision," said Ram. "And it's the right one." "Why do you think so?" "Because we live or die, we'll learn something important from jumping into the fold. Thousands of future travelers will either follow us or not. But if we don't make the jump, we'll learn nothing, have no new options." "A lovely speech. It has been sent back to Earth. It will inspire millions." "Shut up," said Ram.

I believe that we're much healthier if we think of our selfishness as sin. Which is what it is: a sin. Even if there is nothing out there except a random movement of untold gases and objects, sin still exists. You don't need a devil with horns. It's a social definition of sin. Everything we do that is self-indulgent, and that is selfish, and that turns us away from our dignity as human beings is a sin against what we were born with, the capacities we have, what we could make of this planet. Our whole age has taken the line that if you feel bad about yourself, it's something that you can be relieved of by your goddamn analyst. Psst!—it's gone! And then you'll be happy, you know? But that feeling is not something you should be relieved of. It's something you should deal with. And there's no remission for what I mean by "sin," except doing something useful. The confessional does the same thing as the shrink, rather more quickly and cheaper. Three "Hail Mary"s, and you're out. But I've never been the kind of religious person that thinks saying "Hail Mary" is gonna get me out of it.

What did this portend? He still breathed, the instruments did not change, his heart beat on. But he called to Peter. Did this mean that he longed to live the life of his child of the mind, Young Peter? Or in some kind of delirium was he speaking to his brother the Hegemon? Or earlier, his brother as a boy. Peter, wait for me. Peter, did I do well? Peter, don't hurt me. Peter, I hate you. Peter for one smile of yours I'd die or kill. What was his message?

But now, well, he keeps telling me that solitude is the foundation of true wisdom, that all the brilliant thoughts in this house come as the desperate cry of one human being to another, saying, Know me, live with me in the world of my mind.

She left for the Mercury, but I stayed on the roof for a while. I breathed in the city: its warming wind, its noise. And I was one young man on a roof who had just spent the night with a beautiful woman...and the sunlight suggested winter and hard days to come, but we would all survive somehow, and the seasons were bigger than any of us anyway--and we were all tumbling along on the breeze of something enormous and eternal and gloriously busy.

I don't want any description of me to be accurate. I want it to be flattering.

We come into the world alone, we die alone, we live alone. Love and friendship is the nearest thing that we can find to create the illusion that we are not totally alone

This is all so silly,' said Diko. 'Who cares about what's real and what isn't real? [...] And as for our own history, the parts that will be lost, who cares if a mathematician calls us dirty names like "unreal"? They say such slanders about the square root of minus two as well.

I knew all about the importance of dressmakers, because I'd spent my childhood with a woman permanently torn between the necessity of possessing beautiful clothes and the difficulty of paying for them.

Civilization is only a pretense; in the crisis, we become mere apes again, forgetting the rational biped of our pretensions and becoming instead the hairy primate at the mouth of the cave, screeching at the enemy, wishing it would go away, fingering the heavy stone that we’ll use the moment it comes close enough.

Human beings are just machines, Petra knew that, machines that do what you want them to do, if you only know the levers to pull. And no matter how complex people might seem, if you just cut them off from the network of people who give shape to their personality, the communities that form their identity, they'll be reduced to that set of levers. Doesn't matter how hard they resist, or how well they know they're being manipulated. Eventually, if you take the time, you can play the like a piano, every note right where you expect it.

The devil?” Jason heaved the tick over his shoulder like a collier with his sack. “Satan. The adversary. The enemy of the plan of God. The undoer. The destroyer. Yes. He definitely was.” Jason smiled. “But he meant well.

We've decided that your birthday present will be a car", said Marion. Danny was touched. "But the thing I can't figure out is, why would I need a new car?" "You can't very well gate a girl to the movies, Danny," Leslie replied. "I think you're overlooking the biggest point here," said Danny. "I don't need a CAR so I can date. I need a GIRL.

Loneliness is at the heart of Ender's Game, and the reason it works so well is because it carries with it the firm assurance that even though Ender never feels himself to belong,the reader knows he does belong, that he is the ultimate insider even though he stands outside.

All great writers are actors, even merely competent ones are. They have the actor's capacity for getting inside the skins of their leading characters and transfiguring them- whatever they may be, even murderers- with what they can give of themselves. They do that quite as much as actors do.

When a brother is given the right to pass into the third life as a father, then he chooses his greatest rival or his truest friend to give him passage. You. Speaker—ever since I first learned Stark and read The Hive Queen and the Hegemon, I waited for you. I said many times to my father, Rooter, of all humans he is the one who will understand us. Then Rooter told me when your starship came, that it was you and the hive queen aboard that ship, and I knew then that you had come to give me passage, if only I did well." "You did well, Human.

Ender stepped under the water and rinsed himself, took the sweat of combat and let it run down the drain. All gone, except they recycled it and we’ll be drinking Bonzo’s bloodwater in the morning. All the life gone out of it, but his blood just the same, his blood and my sweat, washed down in their stupidity or cruelty or whatever it was that made them let it happen.

Nuestros trabajos en piedra, en pintura, en impreso están a salvo -algunas de ellas por unas pocas décadas, o uno o dos milenios- pero finalmente todo deberá caer en la guerra o desaparecer en la final y universal ceniza.

When President Roosevelt suggested to Archibald MacLeish that radio be prodded to help celebrate the 150th anniversary of the Bill of Rights, Corwin was given the job. It was an enormous undertaking, a 60-minute broadcast to air on the four national networks simultaneously. But We Hold These Truths was to have a special meaning, for the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor the week before, and the show arrived on an unprecedented wave of patriotism. It was estimated by Crossley, the national barometer of radio listenership, that 60 million people tuned in that night, Dec. 15, 1941. Corwin had arranged a stellar cast. James Stewart played the lead, “a citizen” who was the sounding board for the cascade of opinions, historical perspectives, and colloquialisms that flooded the hour. Also in the cast were Edward Arnold, Lionel Barrymore, Walter Brennan, Bob Burns, Walter Huston, Marjorie Main, Edward G. Robinson, Rudy Vallee, and Orson Welles. Bernard Herrmann conducted in Hollywood,

...You believe that the kind of story you want to tell might be best received by the science fiction and fantasy audience. I hope you're right, because in many ways this is the best audience in the world to write for. They're open-minded and intelligent. They want to think as well as feel, understand as well as dream. Above all, they want to be led into places that no one has ever visited before. It's a privilege to tell stories to these readers, and an honour when they applaud the tale you tell.

Maezr smiled. "A hundred years ago, Ender, we found out some things. That when a commander's life is in danger he becomes afraid, and fear slows down his thinking. When a commander knows that he's killing people, he becomes cautious or insane, and neither of those help him do well. And when he's mature, when he has responsibilities and an understanding of the world, he becomes cautious and sluggish and can't do his job. So we trained children, who didn't know anything but the game, and never knew when it would become real. That was the theory, and you proved that the theory worked.

Wild Times Since Mexico accepted communism as a legitimate political party during the 1920’s and allowed refugees greater flexibility of thought, it became a haven from persecution. Moreover, living in Mexico was less costly than most countries, the weather was usually sunny and no one objected to the swinging lifestyle that many of the expats engaged in. It was for these reasons that Julio Mella from Cuba, Leon Trotsky from Russia and others sought refuge there. It also attracted many actors, authors and artists from the United States, many of whom were Communist or, at the very least were “Fellow Travelers” and had leftist leanings. Although the stated basic reason for the Communist Party’s existence was to improve conditions for the working class, it became a hub for the avant-garde, who felt liberated socially as well as politically. The bohemian enclave of Coyoacán now a part of Mexico City, where Frida Kahlo was born, was located just east of San Angel which at the time was a district of the ever expanding City. It also became the gathering place for personalities such as the American actor Orson Welles, the beautiful actress Dolores del Río, the famous artist Diego Rivera and his soon-to-be-wife, “Frida,” who became and is still revered as the illustrious matriarch of Mexico.

No matter what the Bible says—and I'm not a fundamentalist—I just don't think that men were the first. I don't think that Eve was made out of Adam's rib. I think the first sex, biologically, is the female sex, and there are many creatures in our world who are female and only become male as long as is necessary and then revert to the original and superior condition. I think we're a kind of decoration. We're sort of a maddening luxury. The basic and essential human is the woman, and all that we're doing is trying to brighten up the place. That's why all the birds who belong to our sex have prettier feathers—because we have got to try and justify are existence. Look how little we do to keep the race going.

I think acting is like sculpture. In that it’s what you take away from yourself to reveal the truth of what you’re doing — that makes a performance. A performance, what it is, it deserves to be considered great or important, is always entirely made-up of the actor himself and entirely achieved by what he has left in the dressing room before he came out in front of the camera. There is no such thing as becoming another character by putting on a lot of make-up. You may need to put the make-up but what you’re really doing is undressing yourself and even tearing yourself apart and presenting to the public that part of you which corresponds to what you were playing. And there is a villain in each of us, a murderer in each of us, a fascist in each of us, a saint in each of us. The actor is the man or woman who can eliminate from himself those things which will interfere with that truth.

Nuestros trabajos en piedra, en pintura, en impreso están a salvo -algunas de ellas por unas pocas décadas, o uno o dos milenios- pero finalmente todo deberá caer en la guerra o desaparecer en la final y universal ceniza. Los triunfos y los fraudes, los tesoros y las falsificaciones. Es un hecho de la vida. Vamos a morir. "Se de buen corazón", grita el artista muerto desde el pasado vivo, "nuestras canciones serán todas silenciadas, ¿pero qué importa?, sigue cantando.